When I thought about Meetup.com meetings I always thought about German housewife meetings ranting about the good old German time, that was so much better than living in New York (Disclaimer: I am a German). That’s why I never had the idea about going back to the Meetup.com website until the Webmetricsguru forwarded me an invitation about a meetup group without German houswifes.
Today I finally visited the Web 2.0 New York entrepreneur meetup. Not that I am a big entrepreneur, but I was just curious to see new Web 2.0 startups before Techcrunch does.
First presentation was Team patent. Team patent is not live yet and it is a hosted solution for patent lawyers and average Joes, who need help filing a patent. Very very niche market, so I am not sure if this is something that can kick off. There are probably many others that can judge about that much better.
Second presentation was Clipmarks - Clipmarks gives basicially everybody an advanced “copy to clipboard” function. It allows users to grab specific content (e.g. headline and video) from websites and lets them add it to blogs and/or the Clickmarks.com website. I kind of liked the tool b/c of it’s digg-like functionality, but I believe it will be massively used for content scraping and other stupid funny things. With Clipmarks everybody can copy content and add it to his website. SEO’s will love this and Matt Cutts will have to upgrade his cluster filter.
Third presentation was Dai.sy - the human side of the web. Dai.sy is pretty much a browser extension that let’s every website become a social network. The tool looks pretty neat and if the userbase is large enough it might be interesting to join and chat. Still I believe that people are not interested in chatting about Google.com or any other website unless their is an added value (e.g. shopping together and getting a discount). I also believe that the time for new toolbars is over.
4th startup was Helloworld. It’s basicially everything about video. It let’s you create, manage, share, broadcast your video. A lot of functionality, that looked very impressive. In order to understand the entire product I need to digg further into it. It definitely was the most interesting product that night.
5th startup was Theplacefinder. I am not sure what’s new behind this website and after working in the online real estate market for a few years I clearly think that Theplacefinder is completely on the wrong track. There are already established roommate and rental services out there for about 10 years. Additionally Craigslist, Oodle, Kijiji and others have the market pretty much locked up. I recommend this startup to start over with something else. There is no room for another player. At least not in the US market.
Besides getting to know these new startups, I am glad that I joined the event. I always loved to listen to new ideas and this was a great place to do so. I also enjoyed to get to know new people.
